Film Director

M. CARROLL RAVER, writer, photographer, cinematographer and film director, died Monday April, 9th. He was 67. A native of Carroll County, Md., he attended the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill where he was a National Collegiate Athletic Association champion fencer. Early in his career, while at J. Walter Thompson Advertising (NY), he served as a copywriter, producer and director working on television commercials for national clients including Ford. Later, as an award-winning director and cameraman, he directed commercials for Hertz, General Motors, the U.S. Army, BMW and others.

When the call came in March 1995, Sara Maitland thought it was a prank. The voice on the other end of the line introduced himself as film director Stanley Kubrick, and asked, "Would you like to write a film script for me?""He rang me, no warning," the British author recalls. "I called up my agent and said, 'What do you mean giving up my private phone?' "But the call and offer were both genuine. The next day a contract arrived, beginning Maitland's yearlong adventure as the screenwriter for "A.I."

Robert Bresson, 98, a film director who helped redefine French cinema by focusing on images rather than dialogue, died Saturday in Paris. He was best known for his austere approach and helping pave the way for the New Wave movement.The son of a military officer who once studied to be a painter, he often used untrained actors and coached them to speak in monotones. In the 1959 film "Pickpocket," widely regarded as his best film, Mr. Bresson pared down the compulsive art of lifting wallets to its barest psychological elements.

Stephen M. Milius, an award-winning film director and editor who directed hundreds of commercials and corporate videos during his nearly 25-year career, died Monday from complications of pulmonary fibrosis at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver.Milius, who was 48 and lived in Owings Mills, was awaiting a lung transplant when he died.Since 1993, Mr. Milius had been associated with Big Shot Productions in Baltimore, where he planned and directed a variety of videos and films, including commercials, corporate-industrial training videos and infomercials.

John Schlesinger broke the mold.The portly, pugnacious British film director, a recent visitor to Washington to plug his new film, has once again insisted on confounding critics and citizens alike, going his own way, smashing all precedent, and parting company absolutely with his peers and acolytes.And what mold is that?Why, it's the mold originally set by Alfred Hitchcock, and followed more or less intact by other great Brits, such as Sir Carol Reed, Sir David Lean, Tony Richards and later by another generation, including Ridley and Tony Scott, Michael Apted and so forth.

Christine Pascal,42, an actress and film director who made her movie acting debut at 21 and directed her first film at 25, has died, her husband's production agency said yesterday. The agency, Armedia, founded by Ms. Pascal's husband, Richard Boner, did not give the cause of her death, which it said occurred late Friday or early Saturday. Ms. Pascal began her film career in 1974 and directed her first film four years later. She won the 1992 Louis Delluc Prize for directing "Le Petit Prince a Dit" ("The Little Prince Said")

Carlo Pietrangeli, 82, an archaeologist whose 17-year tenure as head of the Vatican Museums culminated with the restoration the Sistine Chapel, died yesterday. Despite a long illness, he had continued in his post as director-general of the museums, where Michelangelo's frescoed ceiling graces the chapel. He was appointed to the top museum post in 1978 by Pope John Paul I.Atef el-Tayeb, 47, a film director who was part of the new realism trend in Egyptian cinema, died yesterday in Cairo after heart surgery.

Incongruous or what? The hotel dining room is posh, brocaded in silks, and through its stately aisles rush liveried waiters with the muted aplomb of funeral directors. Swanky bouquets detonate their expensive colors on each linen-shrouded table, and the silverware and crystal gleam like diamonds in a tiara.And there, in the middle of it all, sits . . . Laverne?Yes, Laverne -- that is, Penny Marshall, with those sad Brooklyn eyes and the look of being endlessly put-upon, sitting in a funk of exhaustion so dense it would, a few days later, cause her to collapse and briefly enter the hospital.

Movie directors are surely the most dynamic men in the world. Think of Cecil B. De Mille in jodhpurs with a megaphone and a riding crop. Think of John Huston laughing and fighting and drinking his way through a fabulous career. Think of Woody Allen's neurotic energy or Steven Spielberg's incredible pizazz.But when one says -- "I sit in a room and people come. I always depend on what's presented" ?That sounds like a memo from the invisible man, or the winner of the Mr. Passive-Aggressive World Championships.

MARBELLA, Spain -- Film director Jean Negulesco, 93, a Romanian whose films included "How to Marry a Millionaire" and "Three Coins in a Fountain" died here Sunday of heart failure and will be buried tomorrow in this Mediterranean coastal resort town where he lived since the late 1960s.Born Feb. 29, 1900, in Craiova, Romania, he came to the United States in 1927.His last directing credit was "The Invisible Six" in 1970. His first movie credit was "Singapore Woman" in 1941. He was known initially for his hard-hitting romantic melodramas, but critics disparaged much of his later work.

With a James Bond party theme, it was no wonder the Hyatt Regency ballroom looked like a movie set. The room was swagged in white chiffon, with clusters of white couches and cube tables along the sides. Red velvet ropes cordoned off the back third of the room, which was elevated for the VIP section. "There's a bottle of vodka on every table here," said real estate developer Patrick Turner, noting the VIP bottle service. No set would be complete without its stars. And there were plenty, thanks to host Baltimore Ravens player Terrell Suggs.

M. CARROLL RAVER, writer, photographer, cinematographer and film director, died Monday April, 9th. He was 67. A native of Carroll County, Md., he attended the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill where he was a National Collegiate Athletic Association champion fencer. Early in his career, while at J. Walter Thompson Advertising (NY), he served as a copywriter, producer and director working on television commercials for national clients including Ford. Later, as an award-winning director and cameraman, he directed commercials for Hertz, General Motors, the U.S. Army, BMW and others.

A celebrated writer doesn't always have the makings of a writer-director. Steven Zaillian earned his reputation as a screenwriter with Schindler's List, but as a writer-director his work is often clumsy or simplistic; even at the script stage, it's as if he's writing down to his limited powers as a film director, or else, as a director, is not getting whatever life or complexity he has on the page. In Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993), his writing-directing debut, Zaillian sheared away the fascinating, complicated mesh of real-life characters in Fred Waitzkin's autobiographical book about being the parent of a chess prodigy, and constructed a hollow fairytale about the need to lead a free, well-rounded life.

Here's probably the only fact you need to know about JimmyO and April Monique Burril: They were married on Halloween 1998 in costume. She was dressed as some sort of demented fairy-type thing, he as a werewolf. Need another fact? Try this one: They've made a movie together, Chainsaw Sally, that has nothing to do with chopping wood. Yep, they're one of those couples. "In this neighborhood, we're definitely the weirdos on the corner," says April, 32, chatting amiably at the dining-room table of their Perryville home, an unassuming end-of-the-row duplex a stone's heave from where the Susquehanna River flows through town.

The luckiest day in Federico Fellini's life may have been the day the circus sent him packing. Fellini, the subject of a month-long film series beginning tonight at the Creative Alliance in Highlandtown, was only 7 at the time, and the middle-class life his parents had made for themselves in the small Italian village of Rimini wasn't doing it for him. Like many kids, he dreamed of something more exciting, more splendid, more colorful. So he ran away from his boarding school and linked up with a traveling circus for a life of clowns and jugglers and animals and people who in their day would have been called freaks.

MICHAEL Johnson stood before the crowd in one of two theaters in the Heritage CinemaPlex on Taylor Avenue and recalled the time he was a film student at that other University of Maryland - the one near Washington, D.C. "The teacher said we were going to watch the greatest film ever made," Johnson said. "I was right off Park Heights, so I figured we were going to be watching Superfly or Shaft. It turned out the film this teacher had in mind was Birth of a Nation." D.W. Griffith's epic 1915 tale of the Civil War and Reconstruction revolutionized the art of filmmaking, pioneering many techniques in use today.

Linda Goldenberg, a motion picture marketing and publicity executive and former Baltimore resident, died of cancer Monday at the Motion Picture and Television Hospital in Woodland Hills, Calif. She was 57. Mrs. Goldenberg, a Los Angeles resident, had been president of marketing for the Premiere Marketing and Distribution Group there since 2001. Born Linda Schwartz in Philadelphia and raised in Baltimore, she was a 1959 graduate of Forest Park High School. She began her career as a secretary for Jack Fruchtman Sr., owner of JF Theaters, one of the largest movie chains in Maryland.

Robert Bresson, 98, a film director who helped redefine French cinema by focusing on images rather than dialogue, died Saturday in Paris. He was best known for his austere approach and helping pave the way for the New Wave movement.The son of a military officer who once studied to be a painter, he often used untrained actors and coached them to speak in monotones. In the 1959 film "Pickpocket," widely regarded as his best film, Mr. Bresson pared down the compulsive art of lifting wallets to its barest psychological elements.

When the call came in March 1995, Sara Maitland thought it was a prank. The voice on the other end of the line introduced himself as film director Stanley Kubrick, and asked, "Would you like to write a film script for me?""He rang me, no warning," the British author recalls. "I called up my agent and said, 'What do you mean giving up my private phone?' "But the call and offer were both genuine. The next day a contract arrived, beginning Maitland's yearlong adventure as the screenwriter for "A.I."

Stephen M. Milius, an award-winning film director and editor who directed hundreds of commercials and corporate videos during his nearly 25-year career, died Monday from complications of pulmonary fibrosis at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver.Milius, who was 48 and lived in Owings Mills, was awaiting a lung transplant when he died.Since 1993, Mr. Milius had been associated with Big Shot Productions in Baltimore, where he planned and directed a variety of videos and films, including commercials, corporate-industrial training videos and infomercials.